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The Racialized and Anachronized Appalachian Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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The Racialized and Anachronized Appalachian Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century BOISSONNEAU, SARA TAYLOR, Ph.D. Other Americans: The Racialized and Anachronized Appalachian Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. (2016) Directed by Dr. María Carla Sánchez. 170 pp. The central claim of this project is that literary and historical texts from the turn of the last century rhetorically contained the Southern Appalachian mountaineer through racializing that figure into less-than-normative whiteness and anachronizing that figure into incompatibility with the modern era. Other scholars have traced the origins of Appalachian stereotypes to this foundational period, and some have also pointed to the capitalistic utility of Appalachian stereotypes given the contemporaneous and rather sudden profitability of Appalachian land and labor via the coal and timber industries. I expand upon previous scholarship to examine this phenomenon in terms of exploitative trends in American history and literature. In particular, I draw a parallel between the rhetoric surrounding the supposedly “Vanishing Indian” in the mid-nineteenth century and that of the supposedly doomed mountaineer, hopelessly backward and incapable of modernizing, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The literary texts that established the hillbilly stereotype—one that has far surpassed the texts themselves in ubiquity—as well as that stereotype’s wide acceptance in historical paratexts of the period demonstrate that mountaineers’ rhetorical exploitation had more than a casual relationship with their material exploitation. In this vein, chapters one through three consider Mary N. Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), Emma Bell Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains (1905), and John Fox, Jr’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), in the context of an emerging racial hierarchy of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which along with denigrating those deemed non-white also privileged and disenfranchised particular kinds of whiteness. Chapter four examines more recent Appalachian literature by Lee Smith and Silas House. Though their novels under consideration here, Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and A Parchment of Leaves (2001), respectively, were published in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, they are set at the turn of the twentieth century, the same period as the earlier literary texts examined in this project. Having at their disposal the effects of land usurpation, Smith and House are able to view the figure of the Southern Appalachian mountaineer over the longue durée, complicating and amending that figure’s earlier characterization. Thus, these authors’ portrayals have something to tell us about the enduring marginalization of the mountaineer and the persistence of historical disenfranchisement. Moreover, while the literature of the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, I argue, was complicit with the ruinous re-appropriation of mountain lands by greedy industrial interests, the literature of the late-twentieth and early-twenty- first centuries may serve as a tool in rehabilitating the image of the Appalachian mountaineer. Finally, in chapter five, the conclusion, I consider modern popular conceptions of Appalachian people, some of which demonstrate that the hillbilly stereotype and its relationship to economic disenfranchisement persist to this day. OTHER AMERICANS: THE RACIALIZED AND ANACHRONIZED APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINEER AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Sara Taylor Boissonneau A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2016 Approved by _____________________________ Committee Chair © 2016 Sara Taylor Boissonneau I dedicate this project to my maternal grandfather, Jack Esham, who grew up during the Great Depression in the Appalachian foothills of Portsmouth, Ohio, and Lewis County, Kentucky. He did not complete high school, leaving home at 17 to serve in the Navy in WWII, but he was a life-long learner. I regret that Pa did not live to see me complete my degree, but he left behind a legacy of highly educated daughters and grandchildren, in no small part because of the value he placed on education. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Sara Taylor Boissonneau has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair._____________________________________ Committee Members._____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my committee, María Carla Sánchez, Noelle Morrissette, Risa Applegarth, and Scott Romine, for their guidance and support, and for the sheer range and breadth of their collective knowledge that they have been willing to share with me. Though Karen Weyler is not on my committee, I am indebted to her expertise and emphasis on archival research in the courses I was privileged to take from her. I received a summer research grant from the UNCG graduate school for summer 2016, which enabled me to travel and complete archival research, and I am grateful for that financial assistance. I also wish to thank Carolyn Brown for funding the Mildred Kates Dissertation Fellowship, which I was awarded for 2016-2017. I owe gratitude to the Margaret I. King Special Collections Library at the University of Kentucky for the use of the John Fox, Jr. and Fox family papers. Tammy Kincade at the June Tolliver House in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, was kind enough to discuss my work with me and point me in the direction of helpful local resources. Kandi Atkinson, with the Kentucky Land Office of the Kentucky Secretary of State, generously provided me with Kentucky land grant documents that proved invaluable to my research. Finally, I am grateful for the support of too many friends and family to provide a complete list, but a special thanks belongs to Andy and Jack for seeing me through my doctoral work. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 II. EMMA BELL MILES AND THE NATIVE MOUNTAINEER ........................35 III. JOHN FOX, JR., THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE, AND DIVIDED APPALACHIA ....................................................................73 IV. THE PERIOD IN RETROSPECT: THE NEO-REGIONALIST REVISIONS OF LEE SMITH AND SILAS HOUSE .................................111 V. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................150 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED............................................................................156 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I am convinced that in order to understand culture in the mountains—or indeed in any culturally enclaved area within a larger, formally pluralistic but essentially assimilationist social system—one must inevitably talk about the politics of culture. -David Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, 7 The Emergence of Appalachia in the National Imagination In an 1899 article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” William Goodell Frost, then president of Berea College in Kentucky, famously asked, The question is whether the mountain people can be enlightened and guided so that they can have a part in the development of their own country, or whether they must give place to foreigners and melt away like so many Indians. (319) This statement is a prime example of the kind of rhetoric that typified descriptions of Southern Appalachian mountaineers at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Here, Frost likens Kentucky mountaineers to the popular idea of “vanishing Indians,” a false phenomenon consumed by the reading public that in part made the usurpation of native 1 Scholars generally agree that the first major description of Appalachian mountaineers as a distinct population in the United States is Will Wallace Harney’s “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” published in Lippincott’s in 1873. The title has become shorthand for Othering perceptions of Appalachian mountaineers. 1 lands and the violent removal of aboriginal peoples from those lands more palatable to the genteel reading public. Indeed, there is an important similarity between Frost’s rhetoric of the disappearing mountaineer and that of the “vanishing Indian.” Brian Dippie, in his monograph, Vanishing Americans: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, describes “Vanishing Americans” as the nineteenth-century idea that “‘Indians...are a vanishing race; they have been wasting away since the day the white man arrived, diminishing in vitality and numbers until, in some not too distant future, no red men will be left on the face of the earth (xi).” Scholar Lora Romero, in discussing the “vanishing Indian” trope, points to James Fenimore Cooper’s introduction to the 1831 edition of The Last of the Mohicans as an important example of that rhetoric: “The Mohicans,” Cooper writes, were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be said the inroads of civilisation,
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